Fifty-six years ago tomorrow — Dec. 7, 1941 — Japanese dive bombers shattered a quiet Hawaiian Sunday morning with their attack on Pearl Harbor. As such events recede into the past, they often become remembered only in round-numbered anniversaries and eventually forgotten, but that must not be so with this date of infamy.

Not just because 2,403 Americans died that day. Not just because it drew this nation into the most destructive war in history, a war that claimed tens of millions of lives and changed the world in ways still being felt. Not just because it demonstrated the power courage and sacrifice can have over evil.

Those things are terribly important, but the real lesson of Pearl Harbor is what happens when tyrants are tolerated, when agressors are appeased.

Today, half a world away from Tokyo, Saddam Hussein is leading Iraq down the same path Japan took to its destruction. He covets his neighbors’ possessions, which he would rather steal than buy. He places no value on human life, especially the lives of his own people, whom he has tortured, gassed and used as shields around his military installations. He has defied the international community, lying his way to an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons — weapons that are designed, first and foremost, for sneak attack.

And Saddam has learned something else from the militarists who took control of Japan — how to play the victim. In the months preceeding their attack, Japanese leaders painted the United States as a bully for its embargo on shipments of oil, rubber, steel and other industrial materials, conveniently neglecting to mention that the embargo was in reaction to Japan’s invasions of China and Indochina.

Six years ago, on the golden anniversary of Pearl Harbor, this newspaper complied first-person narratives from Mainers who were there. One young sailor was thrust into duty as a surgeon’s aide and worked without sleep for two days, treating burn victims, assisting with amputations, consoling the dying. A soldier, weeks away from discharge, his head still ringing from a night on the town, found himself manning an anti-aircraft gun with which he was totally unfamiliar. More than a few watched friends perish in explosions, fire and smoke. Such stories, fascinating snapshots of ordinary people in an extraordinary time, are not merely priceless tidbits of living history. They are the flesh, blood and bones of an invaluable lesson that must never be forgotten.